Kellri’s 18-Day Module Challenge – Day 3

Day #3: T1 The Village of Hommlet. There are a lot of things wrong with the execution of this adventure, not the least of which is the lack of foreshadowing Lareth as the boss to be defeated, but it is still one of my favorite modules of all time.

I’ve only ever DMed this adventure to completion one time, and the results were pretty good. I always find it great fun to role play Elmo! Getting all of the intrigue and faction competition right can be a challenge, but it’s not all that hard. The adventure had great verisimilitude within itself, but when played as a part of the larger T1-4 Temple of Elemental Evil mega-adventure much of that is lost. This is probably due to the change of authors. Gary Gygax planted a lot of seeds in T1, but from what Frank Mentzer has told me, the state of the manuscript he received to complete was little more than session notes of playtests, and the computer system they used at the time was just not up to the task of easily combining and compiling the huge amount of information.

Still, we had a great time playing this adventure and the details of the village NPCs made for lots of great role playing before the characters ever got to the Moathouse. I wish Gary had been able to finish the adventure he’d had planned, but at least we have an example of how to do a starting base village correctly.